Yeah, they're trying to sell a consumer product based on enterprise workloads, but us enterprise guys are using validated SLC drives direct from the SAN/Server vendors, or buying Intel's MLC stuff.

For a consumer, that "All SSD's slow down over time claim" should be expanded to say "All SSD's slow down if you COMPLETELY FILL THE DRIVE AND THEN TORUTURE IT FOR HOURS"

Most consumer workloads are long idle periods with the occasional burst of activity, the sort of thing that all drives do well, at considerably lower $/GB values than OCZ's Vertex line.

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It's called steady-state testing, and yes all drives* lose performance if you give them enough work.

To reach steady-state, you have to really hammer an SSD in a completely unrealistic way that is unlikely to ever happen in everyday consumer use.

1) You have to fill the drive so that there are no available pages/blocks left to write to.2) You have to then torture the drive by continually writing to it before it has a chance to run any internal defrag or garbage-collection.3) You have to keep torturing the drive to maintain the steady-state, because if you give it chance to stop writing, it will defrag, TRIM and garbage-collect, restoring performance to much better levels.

Basically, all consumer SSD's will slow down from their typical write speeds if you dump tens of gigs of data on it on in one go, at speeds faster than it can write.In a consumer situation you're unlikely to be able to do this because you need either 10GigE network, another SSD to read from, or a multi-spindle RAID array to stress an SSD hard enough.

* - Intel's current-gen enterprise drives are targetted towards steady-state performance. They are also more than twice the price of the best consumer drives, so it's not even a valid comparison.

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I hope so. Never been a big fan of OCZ as their reputation for failing drives has been pretty bad in the past. But it seems many have been pleased with the newer drives like the Vertex 460s which came out after Toshiba bought OCZ. So I took a gamble on one myself this week and bought a Vertex 460 240 Gb to upgrade from a Samsung 830 128 Gb ive had for close to 2 years now. most of the reviews have been good from many major sites and I had basically narrowed it down to Samsung 840 Pro 256 Gb, Crucial M550 256 Gb, or the OCZ Vertex 460 240 Gb. Samsung 840 Pro is the best of the bunch but also costs around $200. The Crucial M550 is $157. I will get the Vertex 460 for $110 if I get my $20 rebate back. For almost half the price of the Samsung 840 Pro, worth the gamble. Lets just hope I don't have to RMA the drive like ive had to do twice with Corsair SSDs.